jd87: Excised Paragraph From a Longer Story Currently Known As "Shiny-Winged Aluminum"

by Josh Delman

I'm a crazy college student who likes to write things. I eat peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. I've really been appreciating bananas recently. I'm going to start telling people that when they ask me "what's new?"

If you're interested, there's an RSS feed. For your auditory pleasure: my Last.fm. Some jd87 highlights: Live at Westgate, Haikus, Pt. 1.

This site might be a blog, it might be a a repository for fiction, or it might be something else altogether. Please enjoy.

2009: January / February / March / April / May / June / July / August / September

Excised Paragraph From a Longer Story Currently Known As "Shiny-Winged Aluminum" FICTION

40C feels despair. He does not feel like he’s at the absolute bottom of a dark hole smacked on the side of the planet – no, that analogy’s not right. It’s more like being on the edge of a black hole, a giant, incommensurably massive body, warping the space around it and sucking everything inside, so that neither energy nor matter can escape. He had once been able to dream lucidly, commanding a fantasy world with the sheer will of thought alone, but now his dreams were dark and unpredictable: grey landscapes inhabited by dying trees, sand made of the ground-up skeletons of his friends and family, a vast black and white desert where he was not a player but a mere observer. He would see himself unclothed, laying supine on a beach where the water had long since evaporated, the ground left behind in its wake dried over and cracked. He would float over the scene as an observer, a ghostly disembodiment, and witness himself seizing, his body convulsing and spastically flexing his arms and legs so that they were stretched out at obtuse angles to his body, his head skinless, the top of his neck showing the uneven edges of something hastily torn; and the pupils of his eyes were rolled back into his skull so that they were white and devoid of expression, but his face itself was strained, the sinewy muscles scrunched up and his jaw tight and fixed, and all his teeth were showing, lipless and horrifying. The only color 40C could remember seeing in his dreams was the rich hemoglobin-red of the blood that slowly dripped out of his mouth. And then there was the constant falling sensation, as if he were forever being sucked down into the earth and there was absolutely nothing, nothing he could possibly think of or say, no kind of special technique he could perform, even after hours and hours of dream counseling and keeping a journal of his dreams and telling himself to remember his dreams before he went to sleep and speaking to Jungian therapists and taking Ambien and melatonin and diphenhydramine and valerian root and Lunesta, nothing he could do to wake himself up or convince himself that it all wasn’t real, and for a while, every day he’d wake up in a tepid pool of his own sweat, absolutely fearing sleep. After a while he became a willful insomniac. ♦

July 10, 2009

***